Achieving Equilibrium
by Nightarcher210
Summary: A one shot, on what happened after the liberation of Libria. I know the title isn't the best, but the story's not bad.


**A/N: **Hi everyone. I've never written an Equilibrium fic before. I know it's a lame title, but this just popped into my head. I hope you like it, but it was written in about ten minutes, so it won't be that great.

**Disclaimer:** I own nothing nor am I affiliated with anything that has to do with Kurt Wimmer or the movie.

**Achieving Equilibrium**

The funeral was the biggest that had been held in the known history of Libria. There were fireworks and dances, alongside the tears and wails. He had said that he didn't want sadness at his death, he deserved it after all he'd done, but people cried anyway. He'd been a good man, despite the pain he'd caused. He'd been a good father, too.

He'd never married after he stopped the drug, despite numerous offers. Most of the women just wanted to be associated with the great liberator, anyways. Some were generally interested, until they talked to him for a while. He might as well have still been on Prozium, for all the warmth he showed. So the women eventually drifted away, and then got their daughters to start noticing his son. But the boy was like his father, for a while, at least. He was twenty when she caught his eye, reading a book while the rest of the girls nearby chattered about how handsome he was. Just like his father.

Her name was Isabelle, and Lisa approved of her immediately. Robbie was happy and the girls of the nation mourned. John never said, but she looked like Mary. Robbie had never met Mary, so how could he know? He was just happy that his father seemed to like the girl he married.

Lisa grew to be as beautiful as her mother, if not more so. She had a ready smile and a dancer's body. John felt his heart ache every time he looked at the two new women in his life. They mirrored the ones now long dead. Lisa married, too. He'd been in the monastery at the same time as Robbie, and after liberation had become fast friends. John often wondered if he and Partridge would have had a similar camaraderie. He'd never know.

Jurgen went on to be a great leader. He was objective and wise, always striving to keep the peace. And it was a peace such as the people of Libria had never known. The lessons of the Tetragrammaton, hypocritical though they were, had left their mark. Schools, taking the place of the monasteries, taught tolerance and non-violence. History would not be allowed to repeat itself as long as people remembered what it had been like under the drug, as long as people knew what could come of violence.

John continued to practice the gun kata every day, but he refused to teach it to others. Some ex-clerics opened schools for those who wanted to learn, but John felt that he had done enough harm with it himself. He wouldn't risk unleashing another killing machine into the newly-made society. His death, unlike his life, was peaceful. It came in his sleep. His heart, under the strain of his new emotions (for emotions are powerful things, they can cause physical pain as well as any weapon) gave out. It was not a warrior's death, but John Preston had never wanted to be a warrior anyway. He just wanted to feel.

It was in early December. He had expressed a wish to be cremated, in memoriam of those who he had sent to the incinerator. Not for the first time in their lives, there were two who wished desperately that they could just return to the use of Prozium, if only to ease the ache for a little while.

_Lisa looked up at Robbie, his face alight with the flame of their father's funeral pyre. His eyes were expressionless, a vestige of the years they had hidden their feelings from the people around them. But Lisa could read her brother's emotions as well as he had been able to read their father's. She cried for the both of them. Not the loud, shrieking wails of the others, but silently, the tears streaming down her face. She allowed herself only so many, then stopped. Robbie looked down at her, his eyes no longer blank. He wouldn't cry, but she still knew he felt it. He wrapped an arm around her shoulder, and she leaned into him._

"_I'm cold," she whispered._

_He smiled at her gently, "Let's go inside."_


End file.
